How SimCity Came to Life

The Vietnamese food helped. Steaming soups and noodles that really got the juices flowing. In the last days of SimCity 4’s development, back around the turn of the century, Maxis game designer Ocean Quigley and engineer Andrew Willmott would go order some dumplings and shrimp broth, sit down and cut loose about what the ideal city-simulator might be like in the future, when computers would be significantly more powerful.

Quigley recalls, “We'd go get Vietnamese food and we'd have these pieces of paper and we'd sketch out what the ultimate city simulation architecture could be like. If we had machines that were 20 times more powerful than the machines we had access to, what kind of game would we want to make?”

Ocean Quigley

They were proud of SimCity 4, but frustrated by limited computing power of the day. It was a problem that would have to wait. In the meantime, they would turn their minds to an exciting new Maxis project, Spore, then called SimEverything.

After that, SimCity was barely part of the EA executive team’s plans, at least not as a core innovation-project, but Quigley and Willmott wanted to revisit those brainstorming sessions, believing that the gaming PCs of today would able to handle much of their original vision, as sketched out in the Vietnamese restaurant.

“The increase in graphics horsepower has let us do things that were just completely impossible even a few years ago,” says Quigley. “Ten years ago, you couldn’t dream of doing the sorts of things that we’re doing now. Part of it is that the games of the last decade have become vastly more visually sophisticated, the richness of the lighting, the visual density of stuff and atmospherics, even things like normal mapping. If you look at where the visual bar is for a game now, compared to when we were working on SimCity 3000 or SimCity 4, it’s night and day.”

They met with Maxis' head of production Lucy Bradshaw, to try and state their case.

“Lucy said to me, ‘you've been talking about all these things you've wanted to do with SimCity for the last eight years. I'll give you and Andrew some time to convince me that these ideas are good. I'll give you some time to prototype and mock up some stuff.’

“So when Spore shipped, we took maybe six months or so, this was in late 2008 and into 2009. We built out the first rough version of the GlassBox simulation engine and worked on the visual style of what the game might be, some of the basic new mechanics like snapping buildings together and drawing curvy roads. It was a pretty small project.”

Bradshaw was impressed, but there was still the problem of EA’s corporate structures, the layers of approval needed to get a project to ‘go’ status. “Lucy asked us if our demo could be scaled up to a full SimCity game. We spent some time demonstrating that it could be done. We had to convince people that it was a good idea. It was not a top-down thing. Basically, Andrew and I had been nurturing these desires, these ambitions, for the whole period we were working on Spore. Then we finally got the opportunity to give them some oxygen and set them on fire.”

Exit Theatre Mode

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We had to convince the larger EA world that we had a wonderful idea about new things that you could do.

He adds, “There was just the internal mechanics of the company. It was only after SimCity Societies had run its course that we [Maxis] got our hands back on the franchise. There had been a bunch of SimCity stuff like the iPad version of SimCity 4 and the Wii version. They didn't have a lot of novelty to them. There wasn't a sense that there were a lot of wonderful new things you could do in those SimCities. And the reason for that is that they didn't fundamentally re-imagine how the simulation was going to work. They didn't re-imagine how you were constructing in the environment.

“We had to convince people. We had to convince the larger EA world that we had a wonderful idea about new things that you could do with the simulation and new things that you could do with constructing a world and constructing a city. Once we did that, they said, ‘Okay, there's definitely a lot of love for SimCity. Let's go ahead and try it out’. It was more a matter of us demonstrating that we had something that was new, fresh, and wonderful that we could do on a production scale.”